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Wednesday, November 25, 2015

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Everyone tells me mouse accel is bad, why should I believe you?

A: Because every other form of mouse accel out there IS bad, and most people aren't familiar with linear acceleration with a sensitivity cap. See this post for my take on other types of accel versus this driver. As for why you should believe me, I guess that's up to you. I've mentioned elsewhere that more pro players in Quake3/QuakeLive use acceleration than not. They have among the best aim in the world, and it clearly works for them. The driver talked about in this blog does the same thing as the acceleration options from those games, and a number of those Quake players (including ClampOK and Noctis) have made the switch to this driver so that they can be at home in other games too.

Q: Does the driver work with direct input? Raw input?

A: Yes, and yes. The only games that I've had issues with were Farcry 3 and Farcry: Blood Dragon. They have some silly settings that clip mouse input when it is too high (effectively a built in negative accel). Fortunately, there's a fix for that issue.

Q: What's the deal with signed/unsigned drivers? Why do I have to jump through so many hoops to install your driver?

A: This discussion is no longer relevant. The current version of the driver doesn't need to be signed (it uses the interception library, which isn't kernel-level). The old response to this question is as follows:

Every computer hardware manufacturer out there makes drivers that allows theirdevices to communicate with computers. Drivers are tested by the software engineers in Windows Test mode, and once they have a working product, they get them signed.

Microsoft explicitly doesn't allow unsigned kernel-level drivers to run on machines under normal circumstances since these drivers have more permission than a typical application/exe. When malware finds a way around this protection, it's a bad thing. That said, povohat's driver (and my GUI) have the source code included in the zip files. Feel free to audit it and compile it yourself - we have nothing to hide.

In order to get a driver signed, Microsoft has a list of certificate authorities (CAs) that they trust, and companies who make drivers will purchase a signing certificate from a CA. Typically it costs a few hundred dollars to have a signing certificate, and it lasts for one year. Luckily, once you sign a version of a driver, it stays signed even if your signing certificate expires after the first year.

To date, (6/16/16 as of writing), not a single anticheat vendor has responded to my attempts to contact them. I've addressed VAC, Punkbuster, Fairfight, Blizzard/Warden, and ESEA in various emails, forum posts, and "contact us" type things. Also to date, not a single person has been kicked, banned, or harassed for using this driver under any of these anticheat vendors. There was one instance of an ESEA employee suggesting that you shouldn't use this driver, as it could be used to cheat (wtf?), but he only responded to someone on a forum's direct message, and didn't speak to me.

If you are using the old driver, the requirement of Windows Test mode will block you from using ESEA anticheat.

Q: Would I be able to use this on LAN?

A: Depends on whether the tournament organizers will help you get the driver installed. Since you need administrator privileges to install it, you'd definitely need to coordinate it with them. When I was planning on attending Quakecon 2016, I contacted a tournament organizer, and they were fully on-board with having it installed on all tournament machines. (I ended up deciding to not go though)

Got any more questions? Let me know in the comments, and I'll add to this post!

Thanks for the info Kovaak! Question: have you ever used this driver with a trackball, or even your Steam controller? Note: i have used a 1.75 inch trackball (now optical guts of a logitech g400s mouse) to aim in fps games since 1996

Holy Cow! Incredible news! Last two questions (for now): 1. Does the text file work globally in windows, or do you put it in your game directories ( i assume is similar to an autoexec.cfg or something when you launch a game)

2. Do you have a approximate completion timeline for the gui/new version rollout?

Btw, not for nothin, but i would pay for a method like this, -f'in love it!!! Thanks for the work Kovaak & Povohat!!!

It's global for Windows, but if you want to give different settings per game, the old GUI options are available.

I actually got the GUI reconfigured for this new method today, and I have 3-4 people testing it now.

If you want to test it, shoot me a message on Steam (http://steamcommunity.com/id/KovaaK). Be warned that the intercept driver *might* looks suspicious to anti-cheat vendors (I could see it being used in an aimbot). I've drafted up an email I plan on sending to ESEA, PB, VAC, and FF to hopefully get it white-listed, but I want to get more testing done before so that I can pass along the exes to them.

Hey, not the best question, so I apologize but here's a two-parter with regards to quality-of-life settings: is there a way for, when the software starts, for it to have 'Auto-Profile Switching' checked by default? And as well, is there a way for the software to start minimized to tray.

I know there's a Windows Start shortcut option to start 'Minimized', but it doesn't seem to work for your software.

Not sure if you get notifications on these, but I'll be watching here.

The auto profile switching should save when you close the program manually, but I think there might be a bug where it fails to do so if you let something like Windows shutdown force it closed. So if you turn auto switching on, close the program, then restart it, it should be on.

As for minimized, you can run "intergui.exe -m" and it should start in the tray.

Hello, i hope you are still checking this site. I found that sometimes while intergui.exe is minimized, and i play Overwatch, accel is bugged. It is randomly increasing acceleration for 1 second, and mouse became uncontrolable, and sometimes it looks like crosshair is sleeping for a moment, and after teleports somewhere around starting position. No programs or services are run on background, except of 23 windows processes. I m using windows 7 and logitech g pro. Tried to switch usb port, checked polling rate with mouserate.exe - it is stable(not going higher than 1000hz). MarkC mouse fix installed. Hope for your advice and that we will figure out how to fix it.

I've heard of this happening before, and it's usually something to do with your CPU not giving enough resources to interaccel.exe. Either there is another process running that is starving it, or you should increase in the priority of interaccel.exe. First thing I'd do is run task manager on my second monitor while playing the game, sort it by CPU usage, and try to see if anything spikes up in usage when the mouse gets laggy. If there is nothing apparent, you can try to increase the priority of interaccel.exe by doing what is shown here: http://mywindowshub.com/set-cpu-priority-level-processes-windows-8-1/

Looks like switching priority of Overwatch.exe from "High" to "Low" fixed the problem. However, Source games(TF2, CS, L4D) dont cause this problem even with "High" priority. I'll test it for few days - week, and write again, if this bug still occurs.